The Life And Times Of L.R.G.Carter

Tuesday, 11 September 2012

The wall paper was chosen by the landlord. Let's not dwell on that. Let's dwell instead on that Simon Fraser commision hanging in the middle.

Oh yes, you read that right.

This was a gift for my Wonderful Lady Friend, who loves both Mr Fraser's art, and the adventures of Nikolai Dante. To say she was happy to receive this today would be to put it lightly.

Here is the request I sent Simon:

Seeing as this is a present for my girlfriend, I think I will try and guess what she would like. I'm thinking Lulu looking sexy and dangerous, Dante looking sexy and roguish, and Dante's mum looking sexy and hard as nails (some tautology going on there, me thinks).

I sent this at some crazy time of night, just before going to bed. Just a few hours later, I awoke to find this in my inbox.

I quickly sent Simon a reply, pointing out that my WLF would "love the way you have placed Dante's arse in good focus". Then it was time for the Christmas-eve-esque wait while the art was inked, sent from America to England, dispatched to a frame shop, then finally made it home.

It was worth it though. One of the first things my WLF said was "I love that this picture has both Dante's face and Dante's arse; his two best features!" I know my Lady Friend!

Many thanks to Simon Fraser for this wonderful work. I feel I must offer particular thanks for putting up with my less than literate emails; the excitement was too much for me to put coherent sentences together. I was going to use this post to extol the virtues of the composition and such like, but such words would be pointless when you can just marvel at the finished art above.

Monday, 20 August 2012

This post, I'll be looking at some of the thoughts I had while drawing the adventures of Hauptmann Who. This story was written by Greg Meldrum, and I have to say it is the most inspiring script I've ever worked on. Pretty much every panel had me chuckling, and Greg has been kind enough to let me quote some chunks of the script as I go through the art. In fact, since I wrote this post, Greg has written his own commentary, so check that out here.

Before we get started though, I wish to mention the brilliant work Owen Watts did on the lettering. Owen was kind enough to allow the bouncing back and forth of the lettered art, both of us editing our work till it was just as we wanted it. I'll be looking at the unlettered art in this post, but take a look at that WAAAAOOOOWOOOOH on the first page. Great stuff.

Right then, onto page 1.

The first striking thing for any who have been following my work the past few years is the colour. There are a few jokes in this strip that simply would not work in black and white. I mulled over this choice for quite some time, but eventually decided that I had to crack open the paints. The line art took me just three weeks to do, an advantage of working at A4, but the colour work added months to the work time. The actual watercolours were simple enough, it was the hours of computer tweaking afterwards that slowed me down.

In the end it was worth it. I love the vibrancy of these colours; the pinks and the turquoise and all those stars. Hopefully I kept up the strength of the colours throughout the strip and made them a vital part of the experience.

Lets take a look at the script.

The Asteroid
Belt, our Solar System. Long establishing shot of a series of
asteroids arcing out into space. In the f/g, materialising on top of
a convenient asteroid is Hauptmann Who’s TARDIS, which appears in
the form of a large upright missile, patterned after the WWII V-2
rocket but smaller scale (let’s make it the size of a police box.)...

HAUPTMANN (INSIDE): WE’RE HERE. I’LL JUST EXTEND THE ARTIFICIAL ATMOSPHERE AROUND THE TARDIS TO CREATE A BIT OF
LEBENSRAUM...

Starting off with a Lebensraum joke. This was the first part in the script where I laughed, and I didn't stop for the next five pages. Picture two shows the roundels inside the door, providing one of the few links between this strip and actual Doctor Who. I love the idea that the inside and the outside of the TARDIS doors are entierly different shapes, a feature we sometimes see in the show, but more due to set anomalies rather than the BBC having access to strange, top-secret, time-warping material.

Lets hop forward to the introduction of
Jimi Von
Hendricks. The script says the guitar...

looks like the sort of thing Jack Kirby would have come up with if
you’d asked him to design a musical instrument – still
recognisable as such, but more so, in a
chrome-and-steel-and-mad-valves sort of way.

My friend Jenny found this page to help me out with the Jack Kirby reference; I've led a sheltered life of geekdom and so know only a little about the American greats. I modelled the top of the guitar on the most recent sonic screwdriver, for fairly obvious reasons.

Time for page 2.

Cut to Brandenburg
Gate, Berlin District of Germania, futuristic capital city of Earth.
The gate appears much as it does in Berlin in real life, though in
the distance and nearby we can see hints of a sci-fi landscape of
gleaming technological structures, with the emphasis on grandiose
spectacle...

For future Germania, I went looking for Nazi plans concerning their thousand year Reich. My Wonderful Lady Friend was invaluable here; being an art-historian she was able to guide me in the right direction. Seems that the miracle of concrete would allow them to take their Roman inspiration in far grander directions. That towering building on the far right was designed by Hitler himself, a sketch passed on to Albrecht Speer, from whose mind I pillaged the other buildings. Then I chucked in a few Fliegen-rad to give it that futuristic feel. Nazi anti-gravity technology is an interesting thing, I'm sure you will agree.

I toyed with the idea of doing the picture of World War Minus 1 in sepia tones; but remembered stories of the 'Mud' period of 2000ad history, and so went for the more colourful approach. In the top right of this panel we see my attempt to replicate that famous photo of St Paul's amid the bombing.

The Flux-Fuhrer was described as having "features warped and migrating across his face like some mad, nightmarish Picasso painting." That's why I went for the green.

Bringing us to Page 3.

Here we hit the pages that needed colour. The script called for "a sort of Rastafarian version of the Soviet Flag, with the hammer and sickle coloured black and the rest of the flag made up of three horizontal stripes of equal size: green, yellow and red." Not something easy to convey in black and white. Then we have Marley Luther Lenin. As I don't normally use colour, I don't attempt to convey any skin pigments. Black ink does not convey dark skin, white paper does not convey a lack of eumelanin. Normally I leave skin 'empty', in an attempt to bring equality to my characters; hence this black character from an earlier comic.

Anyway, my thoughts on colour theory in comics are best left for another day. Lets talk about the fact that Baby Hitler has blue eyes and blond hair! Actually, I don't have anything more to say about that. The skull has blue eyes too, and Laika has a nodding Karl Marx on her dashboard! I was going to give her some furry dice as well, but they left the cockpit a little too crowded.

Hurtling into Page 4.

Here is a description for panel 4.

Int. TARDIS. We see the back of
Jimi and the Hauptmann’s heads as we go close in on the
view-screen to observe the surroundings. They have arrived in the
primordial void - a hallucinogenic landscape, full of all manner of
bad-trip-style multi-coloured fractals and twisting patterns.
Central to the viewscreen is the primal atom, about the size of a
house, circled by electrons, which hangs there, throbbing. It will
be the source of the Big Bang. Nearby it is Marley Luther Lenin in
his techno-coffin, the grabber arms reaching up towards the primal
atom. Around and above the coffin, like a fine mist, is his hovering
logarithmic soul.

I changed this a little to get the action going, having them hurtling out of the TARDIS instead of peering at a screen. In doing this I give rise to my one regret for this strip; we don't have room for an internal view of Hauptmann's TARDIS. Ah well, maybe we'll do a sequel one day. Hopefully Greg didn't mind my somewhat tame portrayal of the void before time; fractals are hard to do with watercolours.

And finally Page 5, the Money Shot...

Here we go, the Doctor's wang. Let's have a look at the script for this final panel.

Long shot. Hauptmann Who points
commandingly at Jimi, who obliges by jamming on his guitar and
singing of his devotion to the Hauptmann. Jimi should be throwing
some kind of rock god shapes as he does so, while in the background
the primal atom throbs away and the kaleidoscopic primordial void
creates hallucinogenic patterns, like some atmospheric
sound-to-light programme.

So, not quite what I drew. *Ahem*. Owen didn't want this script to become known as "The one with the wang", so we censored it so that the rest of the story had room to shine. So that post the other day is the first time that particular penis has been waved about in public.

You see, it is implied here that the forthcoming 'Big Bang' is going to start the universe rolling. Also, Hauptmann is keeping his boots on, due to being classy like that. Being a Time-lord Nazi, he has two willies but only one ball. Oh yeah, I went there. Finally we have the kiss, because stories like this end with a kiss. This is a comment on the way Doctor Who stories these days end about five to ten minutes before the credits roll, just so they can ladle on the emotional manipulation for the remainder. Also, that final heart shaped panel is lined like an Iron Cross! Isn't that sweet?

So, the guy gets the other guy, true love rules over all. Intellect and romance prevail, but do not replace brute force and cynicism. It is an interpretation of the Who Mythos that is perhaps closer to the truth of the show than many fans would be willing to admit; Who having a whole heap of unfortunate cultural baggage that seems to constantly resist going away. I'm really proud of this story, and I hope you enjoyed it.

I have been forced to promise not to tell you who it was that said "Of course he's uncut, he's not Jewish!"

I'm back! After over a month of not throwing stuff onto the net, I return to shamelessly self-promote myself! Seeing as I've been away, lets get stuff off to a flying start by publicly releasing the story I did for Dr WTF?! 2012. This story has been available in paper form for a good long while now, but this is the first time it will be seen for FREE!

Dr WTF?! 2012 isn't just one story, oh no. Many talented people combined to make a colourful explosion of awesome, all under the scrupulous attention of editor Owen Watts. You can find out more about it here.

I'm currently writing up my next blog entry, cramming it full of information about the creative process behind this strip. While you wait, please enjoy this tale of Nazi comeuppance, and spare a thought for the state of mind of we who created it.

Sunday, 1 July 2012

I love me a bit of Pat Mills. The other day, my Wonderful Lady Friend was tidying our bedroom and found these ancient pictures I had drawn on the back of some beer-mats. We weren't even going out at the time, so it is pretty sweet that she kept them. I love my Wonderful Lady Friend!

Thursday, 21 June 2012

I've spent the past two days working on illustrations for a personal project of mine. Remember the sort of art that used to grace the pages of Fighting Fantasy books? Beautiful, characterful art, each piece telling its own story while all together forging a unique and distinctive atmosphere? Well, that's what I was going for here. This is for a role-play game called Age of Iron, or, Bigfoots and Dinosaurs. It's all for private use, so I haven't been too worried about being a little derivative. Still, I liked the fast and scratchy feel to them, so I thought I would chuck them up here.

Friday, 15 June 2012

Oh, go on then, bonus points if you answered either hammer time or adventure time.

Comics Bulletin has posted a review of Vanguard #2. Being a selfish little so and so, I'm going to direct your attention to this bit:

"Halo and the Gryphon" is somewhat less demented, but nonetheless has a hint of the weird about it, due in the most part to Louis Carter's art. It's a blend of bold, thick linework and fine detail, and it should make for an ugly clash, but it somehow works, even if it looks less like what one might expect from a post-2000 AD anthology comic and more like one of those Soviet Bloc cartoons that were used to fill an empty five minutes on BBC2 back in the day. The writing lacks the eccentric feel of the art, but the narrative provides some structure that one might well argue is necessary to prevent things getting too arty and indulgent. "Halo and the Gryphon" was my favourite strip from the first issue, and my favourite it remains; it's unique and odd and so very compelling.

Don't forget, you can read this story here, while I'm working on part three.

Friday, 8 June 2012

This weekend, I'm going to be dipping into the latest issue of Paragon. I've just finished the first story, Spencer Nero and the White Spider, by Greg Meldrum, James Corcoran, and John Caliber. Spencer Nero only started one issue previously, but it has fast become my favourite part of the comic. A tightly written story that plays on supernatural themes in a refreshingly original way.

It would be dishonest of me not to admit that I have a somewhat selfish reason for drawing your attention to Paragon. You see, I also have a story in it; Rise of the Mekkosapiens part 4, written by my regular collaborator Matt Mclaughlin.

So maybe you would like to check out Paragon? You can find out how to get hold of it over at the Paragon Blog. It is available in both super-cheap-digital-format, or much-more-meaty-planet-destroying-paper-format.